That’s what I was thinking. A multitude of small businesses are less efficient, so need more people to do the same amount of work as a single large company. And I would imagine that the competition created by many small companies all chasing after the same pool of employees would have a lesser ability to suppress wages: if one business won’t pay their employees well, those employees will just go and work for someone else instead.
I’d really love to know if “job creators” are actually job creators, or if many small businesses actually create more jobs than one large one. Are “job creators” actually job destroyers?
The only time I’ve noticed issues like this on an Android phone was the device I had before my current one. This was a phone that was great when I got it, and I started to notice issues after about 4 years of use. The reality was it was a mid-range device when it was released, it was already a year or two old when I got it, and after a couple of years, the hardware was just not powerful enough for the stuff I was asking it to do.
So I’m inclined to agree with the others who’ve said it really depends on exactly what device you’re using. If you’re buying a budget phone that’s not particularly powerful when it’s brand new, then it’s definitely going to be having issues 2-3 years later, because apps get more demanding as hardware improves, so if your hardware is subpar, you’re going to have issues.
While the allure of getting the cheapest possible phone is strong, if you use your phone for a lot of things, you may have to consider spending a bit more money. One consideration is instead of getting a brand new budget phone, get a second-hand model with higher spec: the price will be similar, but you’ll get better performance for longer. I’m actually trying to think now if I’ve ever had a brand new Android phone, and I can’t remember any of them being new, but they have all served me well, with only one notably having performance issues by the time it was ~5 years old.
So I’m actually going to agree with this, with a caveat, having learned from personal experience - because sometimes we do have to keep talking to these people for work/education/family purposes. When they start arguing about their choice of phone being better, ignore them. But do continue to respond to them about things you need to talk to them about. Or, in short, grey rock the hell out of them.
Method successfully deployed against a guy at university who picked fights about everything, including what phones people had.
The fact that Android lets you use F-Droid, or just install apk’s yourself, again means you’re not tied to a specific phone manufacturer. You can switch to a different phone and redownload all your F-Droid apps and transfer the standalone apk’s over. So even without autotransfer, it’s not difficult to keep everything.
Definitely iPhones. With all the other smartphone brands, if you want to switch, all your apps and data can be transferred over. For example I have used four different brands of smartphone, and the process of transferring everything was straightforward. In contrast, Apple makes it hard to transfer to a non-Apple device without losing all your data and apps, essentially creating a barrier to people changing to a different type of phone that simply doesn’t exist for people changing from, say, Samsung to HTC. Thus Apple effectively has a monopoly on customers that are trapped in its ecosystem.
Additionally, while users of Android-based devices can use apps from a variety of sources, and can heavily modify the OS (including using completely open source versions), Apple users are not only locked into Apple’s ecosystem, but have no choice but to use the OS Apple have provided, in the form Apple dictates, and use only Apple’s shop to buy Apple-approved apps. Once you get an Apple device, you’re stuck with using it only in ways Apple approve of, and they’ll do everything in their power to prevent you from modifying your Apple device or switching to a non-Apple device.
I stand by my belief that victim blaming isn’t helpful, and it’s not laziness. A lot of people don’t have extensive knowledge of technology and are too ground down by working multiple low-paid jobs just to afford food and rent to spend time searching for the best internet browser. People cannot make rational choices when they’re exhausted and afraid.
In both cases, people have to both know that other options exist and know where to find them, because they’re not available as a default option. People don’t actively research browsers and choose one from an ad company. They use the browser their device comes with. Likewise, with ebooks, they buy a device to read ebooks on and then use the ebook shop the device points them towards (most obvious example, if they’ve bought a Kindle, they’re going to use Amazon’s shop that is accessible from the Kindle). Choosing the alternative option requires knowing the other options exist and then devoting the time to finding and using them. The good options in both cases greater time investment.
I’d count having to learn how to use a more technologically complex option as being more time-intensive, personally. Anyone can learn to use a more complicated option, but they need the time and mental resources to learn how to do it. And yeah, as you say, a lot of things are legitimately technical skills, and even reasonably tech-savvy individuals can end up out of their depth in some of the more complicated spaces in the internet. Recently I’ve been switching some things I use over to open source alternatives, and the number of options that look like they’re better than the convenient proprietary ones but which come with no or utterly arcane instructions for how to use them (or even just install them) is very high. I’m pretty sure I could figure it out for myself if I had enough time, because I’m very much in the “poke buttons to see what happens” camp when it comes to tech. But I genuinely just don’t have the time, and in the absence of more user-friendly good options, the bad options that have a shallower learning curve are more accessible.
If we had made the right choice instead of convenience, we wouldn’t be paying so much to rent seekers.
The right choices are generally more expensive (in terms of up-front costs, even if they’re less expensive in the long run) and/or require more time investment, both of which are lacking for the poor. The appeal of convenience is that a decision can be made quickly, allowing the person to mentally tick off that problem as dealt with and move on to other problems. The rent seekers want people to be poor, in precarious living situations, so that they’re less capable of making good decisions. It’s not helpful to blame the victims of a system that’s rigged against them.
The quickest and simplest way of doing it is to simply regulate for all assets to be valued/revalued and tax paid appropriately any time it changes ownership, and “changes of ownership” is given a definition that includes a corporation giving it to the CEO, a CEO moving it to a trust or holding company, etc. It would do away with the bullshit “our CEO doesn’t get paid” when really he got millions in stock options instead. The stock options changed hands, therefore they have to be professionally and independently valued, and then taxed.
I don’t know if the default Windows photo viewer itself does any of the editing stuff anymore.
It does, and it’s also available on Windows 10. Pretty sure I also have it on my Windows 11 laptop. I use it fairly regularly when all I’m doing is simple stuff like rotating or cropping, because it’s quicker than opening Photoshop.
In Windows, the built-in Photos program(?) does most of what you want. Literally go to the folder where the images are, right click, choose “Open with” and then “Photos”. It’ll open the image in a very, very simple image viewer, where you can move back and forth between images in the same folder, and it has options for rotating, cropping, editing brightness, contrast, saturation, etc. The only thing missing is a mirror image option.
I use Photos pretty regularly, if all I need to do is crop or rotate an image, because its integration into Windows means it’s significantly faster than opening a proper image editor. It’s also really good for reviewing a whole batch of photos, as again its integration into Windows means you can delete an unwanted image within Photos and it’ll remove it from the folder as well.
It’s not open source, so maybe not quite what you’re looking for, but it’s definitely completely free and already part of Windows.
If I run into a problem, there is no way I will be creating an account on Discord to get help. It might not be worth the time and effort. A searchable forum is good enough.
I use Discord, but I actually agree with this. It’s a really good platform for small groups of people to communicate with each other - for example, we have one for my class at university, which allows us to keep in contact about assignments, projects, deadlines, etc. What I don’t want to do is join a Discord server for every single game or piece of software I need help with. It’s just not a great platform for having hundreds or thousands of people trying to get help, often asking the same questions over and over, while the community regulars are chatting about their personal lives.
Searchable forums, website-based FAQs and help files, or any other option that makes help accessible without having to download new software or sign up for new accounts, are the most suitable options for making help available.
I don’t even have that problem, since the computers around my house use various versions of Windows. So it’s not like a lack of OS-native drivers is the issue. It’s just not a very good printer.
My experience is generally that the drivers and software for HP is better, but the hardware and value for money is better with Brother. That said, I also have to give a thumbs up to the third party ink supplier I’ve been using for the HP printer (which I bought because I needed colour printing for the pre-degree course I did last year), who replaced all of my cartridges free of charge after a firmware update snuck in even with auto-update turned off.
Personally I was rather disappointed with my Brother laser printer. Hardware wise, sure, it’s still going after a long time and is still on its first toner cartridge. Software wise, I can’t recommend it. Will not print without first running a printer troubleshooting process on the computer. At least I have a workaround that works 90% of the time, but a printer that will only wake from deep sleep mode when the troubleshooter forces it to isn’t a printer I’d recommend.
Not that I have any better suggestions. Every printer I’ve ever owned has sucked in at least one way. For some reason no manufacturer has ever succeeded in creating a printer that isn’t evil.
If he’s living in it as well, it could just as easily become a death trap for him.
He thinks he knows how to build a colony on Mars better than anyone. He hasn’t considered that maybe there are good reasons why it hasn’t been done yet. His first colony will be a death trap.
I wasn’t overly familiar with this project, but now that I’ve read up on it… what in the actual fuck? You could offer me the entirety of Elon Musk’s hoard wealth and it would still not be enough to convince me to step foot in that claustophobic death trap.
The thing that really strikes me is that there seems to be very little difference between Musk going “I know how to build transport tunnels better than any of the countless engineers who have built them before!” and that Titan submarine guy going “I know how to build deep sea submersibles better than any of the countless engineers who have built them before!” And it seems likely that Musk’s death trap will have a similar ending, only Musk won’t be inside it at the time. Techbros seem incredibly unwilling to consider that there are often reasons why things are built the way they are.
Yeah, good luck enforcing that contract in any country that has a legal concept of “automatically unfair contract terms”.